Andrew Sheng, Distinguished Fellow of the Asia Global Institute at the University of Hong Kong and a member of the UNEP Advisory Council on Sustainable Finance, is a former chairman of the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission, and is currently an adjunct professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing. His latest book is From Asian to Global Financial Crisis.

Xiao Geng, President of the Hong Kong Institution for International Finance, is a professor at Peking University HSBC Business School and at the University of Hong Kong's Faculty of Business and Economics.

Response to yw yap.
"Guess I gotta get used to just watching TV or sharing propaganda fake news and/or policies on the net? "

Well, if you will be financially secure in a few years and don't need to work, you can afford that luxury - othwewise I guess life-long re-training beckons.
For myself, I plan to campaign for completely free post-18 education and retraining for all UK citizens who want it, at any time. Not just 3-year full degree courses, but life-long periodic 9 to 12 month "bootcamp" training into still-viable professions, fully paid for by the state, as automation starts to swallow one field after another over the coming couple of decades . This will all be (shockingly) costly, but the outlay should come back in few years in the form of a populace that is at least somewhat equipped to face the tempest. Having said that, I accept my suggestion is very much just a stay of execution for a couple of decades - i'ts guesswork what then beyond that as we have no idea what type of societies emegre out of the maelstrom.
Which country are you based in? I would guess the UK, as only a Brit would use the phrase "thingy" :)

Around 50% of all professions globally are automatable within a decade, and likely over 85%+ within two decades. That's not to say everything that can be automated will be, or that (a small number of) other jobs won't be created, but the bulk of that figure remains accurate. When discussing this topic, I often hear people say to the effect: “we will come up with new jobs for goods and services that machines aren’t able to create/do, so people will have work”. To which my answer is: but automation isn’t three decades away, it’s not even three years away, it’s here now. Unless you can point, right now, to what those jobs and goods and services are, I venture to suggest you have lost that argument.

I often use the phrase “automation-driven unemployment tsunami” in the context of the wave heading humanity's way. I am an (old) coder working in IT. I have been banging on to people for several years (to the point of tedium) about the sheer speed with which automation is going to unfold – the current estimates of 30%+ loss of jobs within a decade are if anything underplaying things. Most people in the world simply don’t have any idea of the societal disruption automation will cause and the threat it poses to incomes, lifestyles, and any kind of long term stability, where every bit of know-how people have built up over decades is rendered useless within half a decade. I know technology-driven change is unstoppable – the chances of even slowing it down are about as good as King Canute holding back the sea. But after all these years, I am now extremely pessimistic about what is coming. Part of my alarm stems from the speed and simultaneity with which things will happen. A tipping point will be hit sometime within the next ten years (yes, that quick), when lots of professions will start losing human workers *all at the same time* globally. As there won’t be many professions left people can run to, everyone with any gumption or spirit, anyone who doesn’t want to be sitting around watching TV all day, will attempt to retrain into professions that are still viable. The world is full of smart people. That means (to give just an inkling), a lot of taxi-drivers will attempt to learn programming. A lot of actuaries and lawyers will retrain as Neuroscientists. Imagine this on a global scale, affecting hundreds of millions (perhaps billions) of people. A maelstrom, all compressed within a decade, circa 202 to 2030.

Another concern in the back of my head is about observed anthropological phenomena in peoples who have been defeated through superior technology, that large sections of humanity sink into a kind of stupor, of drink and drugs and depression – think American Indians in reservations or Australian Aborigines.

The standard ya-da ya-da trotted out as solutions – especially in left leaning circles - is about "Universal Basic Income" and also about taxing robots - but it's trivially easy to demolish those and show these don’t stack up at all.

The truly shocking thing to me is what the political leadership of the world are up to regarding automation. The silence on the issue of large-scale automation from the political class globally is baffling and completely unsatisfactory. It is inconceivable to me that the likes of Trump, May, Merkel, Jinping, Abe, Modi, Putin, of necessity amongst the most well informed people on earth, don't know what's coming and what automation will do globally.

So the politicos absolutely know. So the question then becomes, why have politicians globally not been raising and debating the impact of automation loudly in public?

tQ to Prashant Kotak for his Comment. Guess the Speed which this Automation thingy is coming mean there is really no solution for the masses. People who are connected to WeChat, Google, FB etc will be extremely gungho in chasing forward.

Guess I gotta get used to just watching TV or sharing propaganda fake news and/or policies on the net?

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